A recent Quora question about the relationship between office design and performance received an insightful answer from Yuval Ariav, VC and Founder at Fundbox.
The original question: What's the relationship between quality of office space and company performance in tech companies?
Here are the highlights from Ariav's answer.
Bringing heads together: The better designed the office space is, both aesthetically and functionally, the more time employees will stay in. And the more that happens, the more productive they'll be overall in collaborative roles.
(Not) bringing the noise: Particularly for younger teams in smaller offices, office space design can make the difference between people being able to concentrate and not... The sounds can just get unbearable.
Office space and culture: This might seems silly, but there are many ways in which the office design can help shape and instill the company culture, and by doing so, increase the alignment of all employees. The best known example, perhaps, is the open office design, which is being hated on of late, although my feeling is that it's just misused and mismanaged. Some of the ideas behind open office are projecting transparency and facilitating communication between team members, both of which are cultural values. There are other ways in which design reflects on culture: how many meeting rooms you have, the ratio between male and female bathrooms, etc.
High-quality office space helps in recruiting top talent: And top talent boosts company performance (duh!).
